What’s up, everyone? Things are rolling at a steady pace for us at True Life Game. There are a bunch of things we want to share with you guys: what’s different in the Journal; ideas for video content; the official True Life Game forum; what we see when we look out of our window.
The Journal
We have decided to split it in two different subjects, on two separate days: Weblog Posts and Concept Posts.
Every Monday – Weblog Posts: It is the journal per se. It’s what you are reading right now. We will update you with our developments and plans, on a more behind the scenes approach. We will also tell you what we have done in the previous week and what our plans are for the forthcoming week. Everything directly related to the team or to the work done and planned on the True Life Game project will reach you via a Weblog Post on Mondays.
Every Friday – Concept Posts: As we work on the concepts involving this project, as we research new and cool ways to apply gamification (or anything interesting, really) to real life, as we discuss and share ideas regarding whatever motivates us, there is a flow of information that we put into paper. Digital paper – we love the trees!
In other words, we get lots of raw material to work on. We grab all this information and transform it into what we call a Concept Post. Basically, it is our way to transmit our vision about everything related to Gamification. While this is only one of the branches of the long term vision of True Life Game, it gives, both the team and the community, hints on how optimize the use of gamification concepts in real life. This way we all can work on the backbone of an awesome idea.
Video content
This is something we have been discussing for some time now. We plan on creating some video content to publish as True Life Game on a few video sharing platforms. We have two main goals with this: a) expand our community beyond the Facebook borderlines; b) reach out a broader audience, by providing another format besides the text-only we have been doing so far.
We have some ideas regarding this. We believe you will enjoy them! But, as always, you are encouraged to send us your suggestions.
We are not sure exactly when we will start with this format, as we still have some technical issues to solve first. We will keep you posted.
Official True Life Game forum
Yeah! We have one now! It’s new, fresh and lonely… but we expect it to grow as the community gets more engaged with both the project and its concepts. So, come on in, say hello and start throwing questions and suggestions at each other! And at us. We envision this forum as the place where amazing ideas will hatch and be nurtured by an awesome and dedicated community. In ten years we will look back and say: “This is where it all began!”
Our window view
We are not the only ones researching and working the concept of gamification. As we have said before, this concept is being applied on several areas for some years now. But we see an opportunity to make it even bigger, greater, more fun. That is our work at “home” – the True Life Game project.
When we go to our window, we see a lot of other cool projects working on gamification. Last week we have talked a bit about Nike+. Another project that comes to mind is Duolingo, a language learning platform based on gamification. These are just two great examples of what gamification can do for people.
This week our Concept Post will be about the multiplayer mechanics and a few ideas of how we can apply them to a gamified environment. As in games, multiplayer can be either about competition, cooperation or both. Our opinion is that there are great advantages on both, as long as there is fair play and fun involved!